Flat panel displays or wall type television sets have been discussed in the prior art literature for about forty years, but few have been produced. As of mid 1998 there were three primary flat panel technologies for flat panel displays:
A. Field Emission Displays (FED's.)
B. Plasma Displays
C. Active Matrix Liquid Crystal Displays (AMLCD)
Field emission displays are a relatively new technology. They consist of an array of field emission points in a vacuum, spraying electrons onto a phosphor screen. With three color dots on the screen and addressibility of the emitting points, one has a full color display.
The Plasma displays have been produced for about 25 years, mostly as a single color orange neon “glow discharge”. In the last 10 years, UV light from this discharge has been “harnessed” to excite three color phosphors to produce a color plasma displays. 40″ diagonal displays have been recently announced, but their cost is about $10,000.
Active matrix liquid crystal displays have been intensively developed for production. Billions of dollars have been spent on their development over the last 20 years, but the results have been only an expensive small display (10.4 inch diagonal) for lap top computers. The 1996 cost of a 10.4″ display is about $500. Wall type TV units, 20″ diagonal or so, are perhaps available after the year 2000, but very expensive.
The reason for the small size/high cost of production are the currently used manufacturing techniques. These include:
A. Photolithography or the patterning of photo sensitive resists and the “washing” and etching processes that are attendant to them.
B. Silk screen printing of relatively large area features (30μ or more).
C. Low pressure sputtering processes for coating glasses with metals like aluminum or indium/tin oxide (ITO), a transparent electrode or dielectrics like SiO2.
In all cases the process has many steps, many in which the glass has to be heated and then cooled back to room temperature before the next step. Each of these steps requires a large piece of capital equipment in a class 100 clean room whose capital cost is $500 per square foot for the room itself. The capital equipment runs the gamut from a $40,000 liquid etcher, or developer, to a $2.5M stepper to a $4M sputtering cluster (six to eight vacuum chambers that accept 1 m×1 m glass).
There is “suite” of expensive capital equipment in a typical $500 per square foot clean room so that the cost of a modern AMLCD production facility is approximately $500 Million. None of the raw materials for the displays, including the glass, glass powder or frit, phosphor, aluminum or nickel, resin or color filter resins are very expensive. Costs are incurred by the capital equipment and low yield of a complex process with many steps.
What is needed is a simpler manufacturing process with fewer steps that requires less capital equipment, does not involve heating and cooling within the imaging step as this dimensionally distorts the glass substrate by thermal expansion, and is implementable with relatively inexpensive machinery, i.e. no vacuum chambers, laser exposure steps etc.
Electrostatic printing has been used for color proofing in Du Ponts EMP process during the late 1980's. Du Pont used the electrostatic printing which is described by Reisenfield in U.S. Pat. No. 4,732,831. It used liquid toners that were transferred directly to a smooth, coated sheet of paper.
The transfer of liquid toner, which is important to this invention, was disclosed by Bujese in U.S. Pat. No. 4,879,184 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,786,576. These documents teach the transfer of liquid toners across a finite mechanical gap, typically 50μ to 150μ. This technology has been applied where toner, with etch resist properties, was transferred to copper clad glass epoxy boards.
Other prior work related to the printing plate and “gap transfer” includes M. B. Culhane (Defensive Publication# T869004, Dec. 16, 1969) and Ingersol and Beckmore to the electrostatic printing plate (U.S. Pat. No. 3,286,025 and RE No. 29,357; RE No. 29,537 respectively).